Sergei Lukyanenko’s Watches books have utterly captivated me. The moody atmosphere and strong characterization drive an uncompromising examination of good and evil. Oh, and the story isn’t bad either. Where Day Watch acted as the natural extension of Night Watch, exploring some of the same material from the perspective of Darkness, Twilight Watch almost starts from scratch with a new, overriding storyline that runs through all three sections of the book. While the vignettes that compose all of the Watches books have never felt truly disconnected, there is a more immediate sense of continuity at work in Twilight Watch that lends urgency to the unfolding events.

Twilight Watch rejoins Night Watchman Anton years after the events in Prague at the end of Day Watch. He’s settled down with Svetlana and had a daughter, Nadya, who is already starting to show her strong potential as an Other. Anton is recalled early from one of his rare vacations at the behest of Gesar to investigate a troubling letter. The anonymous author claims that someone has offered a human the opportunity to become an Other, and not just a low level vampire or werewolf, but a full-fledged magician. Both the Night and Day Watches believe this to be impossible, but are concerned that someone has revealed the existence of the supernatural to a human. Anton goes undercover to identify the human in question and attempt to catch the unknown Other in the act, but as always, things are more complicated than they appear. What starts to unfold is a shadowy power play that reaches back all the way to the Russian Revolution. The stakes are high for both Watches and the Inquisition, as they clash over the awakening of a powerful witch, the terrible secret of magical power and the ultimate fate of the Others.

After a seemingly interminable four years of waiting for Brandon Sanderson to wash his hands of the Wheel of Time, it is finally time to return to the series that got me hooked on Sanderson in the first place, The Stormlight Archive. The Way of Kings was a great novel that suffered most from being little more than a prologue to the rest of the series. But now the real story can begin.

Words of Radiance returns us to the world of Roshar, picking up almost exactly where The Way of Kings left off. The four main protagonists have been carried over, though Shallan has a much larger role in this book, and Szeth has fewer chapters. The events of Way of Kings have brought all the major players to the Shattered Plains where the Alethi campaign against the Parshendi is drawing to a close. At the same time, signs and portents of a great calamity begin to appear around Dalinar and Kaladin. Time is running out, the Alethi are on the brink of a civil war and the Assassin in White has returned to kill the last great leader in the east.

Day Watch is a strong successor to the gritty, twilight world that Sergei Lukyanenko introduced us to in Night Watch. After exploring the moral dilemmas facing a ‘good’ person trying to maintain a status quo that is anything but good, Lukyanenko shifts his focus to take a look at the bad guys. That being said, Day Watch isn’t as strong overall as its prequel, partly because the Dark Others aren’t faced with the same quandaries as the Light. Lukyanenko’s strengths lie in those internal debates and without them the stories have less weight.

Like Night Watch, Day Watch is composed of three separate but interconnected stories. The first deals with a recurring character from the first book, Alisa Donnikova, a mid-level witch with the Day Watch. Alisa is sent to a summer camp to recover her powers after a strenuous conflict with the Night Watch. There, without her powers, she starts to fall in love with a human, putting strain on her identity as a callous Dark Other. The second story shifts to an unknown Dark Magician named Vitaly Rogoza. He has no memory of his past, but is rapidly awakening to tremendous dark power and a purpose he doesn’t understand. The final story takes us back to Anton, the Night Watchman from the first book, and his counterpart in the Day Watch, a wizard named Edgar, as they travel to Prague to face a tribunal of the Inquisition.

EX-Heroes falls very clearly in my reading category of ‘book candy.’ It’s light, entertaining, but lacking many qualities of actual literary goodness. Well, actually the concept is executed rather well and Clines manages to tell a pretty compelling story within his somewhat limited framework, so maybe the novel isn’t all that lacking. But at the end of the day, there’s very little here that hasn’t been explored before. Points for novelty notwithstanding.

The book bills itself as “The Avengers meets The Walking Dead,” and that’s pretty much the premise. A sequence of international events prompt the rise of a small number of ‘superheroes,’ who only have a few years to establish themselves before the zombie apocalypse kicks off. The book is told in two parallel arcs, one following a conclave of heroes who have carved out a sanctuary in the ruins of Paramount Studios in the post-zombie world. The other arc jumps between perspectives of various heroes as they tell portions of their origin stories or their first contact with the book’s zombies, called ‘Exes.’

Japanese horror ranges pretty heavily from mild ghost stories to some incredibly creepy and dehumanizing body horror. Apparitions fortunately falls into the former citatory, chronicling a series of stories that walk a fine line between scary and sentimental. These tales capitalize on the cornerstone of Japanese spirituality: that every object and creature is imbued with a sprit. At their core, these stories are more cautionary tales, advising the listener to act with honor and respect or risk the wrath of the Kami.

Apparitions consists of nine stories, all of which take place what would be ‘middle-class’ households in Edo-period Japan. The stories are as much historical as they are fantasy or horror, and these historical elements set the tone for the whole collection. The book is steeped in nostalgia, and a longing for simpler times when people were held accountable, not only for their actions, but for their attitude and personal honor. It’s through this sepia colored lens that these ayakashi, or spirits, emerge into view.

(Read in stereotypical movie preview voiceover) In a world where epic battles between good and evil are a dime a dozen on the Teen Fantasy shelves, one Russian author struggles to bring a sense of subtly and realism to stories about vampires, werewolves and wizards. (End voiceover) And that’s to his credit. Lukyanenko’s vision of a supernatural world where nothing is as it seems sounds trite on paper, but it is actually a well-conceived exploration of the tropes that make up our understanding of good and evil.